When I was a kid my mother took me to John Steinbeck’s boyhood home in Salinas, which was then a museum (and I imagine still is). We were the only ones there, and maybe because we were the only ones there, the staff historian ducked into a back room and brought out a letter Steinbeck wrote to his agent following the assassination of John Kennedy and read it aloud and cried. This morning I finished rereading Travels with Charley and got to thinking of that man (the historian) and how caught up he was in Steinbeck’s letters and of Steinbeck’s admiration for Kennedy and of his (Steinbeck’s) profound sense of loss. I don’t have any message here beyond that. Just thinking of the letters and of the historian reading them to a random woman and her young boy and how quiet Steinbeck’s house was that day. It’s Sunday afternoon now. The winter sun is making great shadows of the trees that stretch across the tawny grass and grow longer as the sun dips west. I hope you are doing fine and are as untroubled today as is possible.
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I had a similar experience as a young child at Robert Service’s house/museum.
Today the neighbour kids are playing in our yard, using spray bottles filled with water to dye the fresh snow. It is one of the girl’s 9th birthdays.
They asked if they could spray the snow, and I said they could make art of our front yard.
Then one of the young girls said “can we write inappropriate words like poop?” I laughed and thanked them for asking and said I’d prefer kind words in my yard, but love that there is a rogue party of 9 year olds who feel safe making art and asking questions in this small world of friendly neighbours who watch out for them.
I visited Hemingway’s house outside Havana. My cool curator story is talking to a lady by the pool who told me about his cats, and I’d been in Cuba talking to locals for enough days that I could understand *most* of what she said (the accent is incredibly different than the Mexican Spanish I’m used to). And there was an amazingly gorgeous thunderstorm.